I'd like my $8200 (.00041%) of that 2$ billion Facebook deal now, please. I backed a VR project for games, not a massive social media company's fairly obvious attempt to stay relevant in the face of a waning Facebook and make more money in the long run.

I'm a game developer/artist struggling to even find a job in the face of frequent studio layoffs. Shareholder stake in something I believed in would have helped a LOT right about now, but screw the little people, right? Thanks for that...

I supported this because it's something that I've wanted to see become a reality since I read my first William Gibson novel. Now I find out that I might as well have handed my money right to Facebook and I feel a little sick. Enjoy your payday I guess. Please forward me an address so I can return my T-Shirt.

@Jeff McMorris - Re: the govt, etc, that isnt the point. That type of stuff will ALWAYS be around. It's quite another matter to just say "Hey FB, read whatever data you want! Collect any aggregate data you want!". They have a choice with FB to use it or not. They have no choice with the former.

If i where Oculus and Facebook, i'd ship DK2 earlier and re-pay the $2,4 million of the backer money - just to make everyone as happy as possible and potentially save some devs and face! Then make a public lawfully backed statement that Oculus Rift will be developed as an open platform that will continue to be non-bound and lock-in-free hardware.

I am not sure why everyone's so upset. Facebook is going to increase resources available to oculus. It's just silly to think it's going to become an advertising platform. Facebook is smart they saw the future, just like the rest of us here and bought it for 2 billion. They got a bargain.

Sure the Facebook website sucks, but for me it's mostly because people post so much crap. It's like a big chain email letter now. As far as privacy goes, people get over it. Privacy doesn't exist anywhere online anymore as all the NSA leaks have shown us. The answer is just don't post anything you don't want public.

I think Facebook the company is kind of trying to become like Oracle. A company built on acquisitions... Nothing wrong with that. They have done some good too, facebooks open source hardware initiative, origami, hack, hhvm. All great contributions. A lot more than google has done lately...

Getting back to VR. It's going to take significant resources to make VR truly mainstream. Today Oculus just got a lot of extra resources. Who knows if they will dominate the market. They have first mover advantage but there are a lot of big companies who will focus on it in the next few years. Companies like Intel and Microsoft who need a new hit desperately. Google who seems to enter every new field and try to grab it for themselves. Apple will watch the early progress and then come out with something that will fix most of the initial problems... Anyway it's the beginning, the next few years will be interesting. I just wish we could have invested in oculus stock when we backed the kick starter.

Anyway good luck to the Oculus team, now go build us the future and show all the naysayers why this was good news:-)

@Noah: I feel that people right now are just blinded by their hatred for Facebook, I mean... it hasn't been 10 hours since the purchase and people are already ranting like if someone stole their car.

I know that they've done lot's of bad things against their user's privacy and that Mark might not the nicest person on the planet, but they are pumping lot's of cash into the project, and at least this will only help the project to move faster to their goals.

I'm not saying to blindly follow Oculus decisions, i just think that you should not cry for milk that haven't been spilled yet.

VR is a part of the future. We are a community that believes this, but outside of this relatively small community the average person needs more convincing. It is of course something of a relief to see a company the size of Facebook willing to bet a decent amount of their play money on Oculus, and it will undoubtedly bring some attention to VR in the short term, but at what cost to the VR community, and Oculus' mission?

The worry is two-fold. Oculus was very successful in rallying a community around a single piece of technology; they acted to focus VR enthusiasts on one "best path" forward. Oculus' success to date is based in no small part around their community outreach and their position as an independent engine focused entirely on the improvement of the VR experience. As a small division of Facebook they forfeit that position. And that’s where the second and primary concern comes in.

Facebook is a huge company that does something very boring, very clever and slightly evil. It manages an enormous database that collects vast amounts of information from a population that is not yet savvy to the downsides of trading their private information for the right to use a service at no cost. To date Facebook has dabbled in a variety of hardware projects, and most of them have failed (who all owns a Facebook phone say yeah). It's safe to say that hardware is not their focus or core competency.

At this point Facebook's value is hyperinflated. They have value only because of the size of their user base, and while they have been king of the hill for almost a decade there is no law of the universe that prevents them from sharing the fate of Myspace or Friendster. Facebook seems aware of this, and it is doing a very smart thing by spending money while the money is there to spend in an attempt to secure its future position. Instagram, for example, was purchased primarily for its user base. There was nothing preventing Facebook from offering a competing service, but it was much smarter to absorb existing users than to try to attract them from a competitor. Everything Facebook buys is focused on driving customers to the mothership, whether or not they would explicitly prefer not to feed the Facebook machine with every intimate detail of their lives.

So one has to ask oneself, does Facebook want Oculus so that it can be a part of improving the VR experience, or does it simply see Oculus as a wearable information gathering device? A week ago Oculus was a very successful company about a year away from releasing its first consumer VR hardware. Now Oculus’ mission almost has to be to feed more user data into Facebook. It’s hard to imagine a product being released that is not hard-linked to a Facebook account. Now instead of just being a VR pioneer, Oculus users can become the first guinea pigs to share everything they do in their virtual worlds with the Facebook database.

Where you are looking, what you are looking at, who you are interacting with, when are you doing it. These are all more data points for Facebook. And of course there is nothing stopping them from putting targeted ads into a user’s field of vision. Enjoying that virtual world? You might enjoy it more with a Coke.

I'm not a fan of Facebook, but I still use the platform. Part of me is impressed that Facebook has managed to stay relevant for as long as it has, part of me is disgusted by what it does to do so. All of me is worried about what part Oculus has in this puzzle. I just can’t, as hard as I try, imagine anything good.

Congratulations on the sale :)
I'm happy that the idea that I helped backing ended up being evaluated for 2.000 million USD, is like if every dollar that anyone donated just turned into ~1000 dollars (well... is a lot less, but i'm not in the mood to do math right now xD)
Just hope that you can continue being as open and continue working with the same (or more) freedom that you have done until now :)

In the months since backing this, I began to believe that the Rift would be a commercial flop, but I mostly didn't express this opinion. But between this and Sony's VR project, I'm absolutely sure that the Rift is doomed.

Shame on you Palmer, shame on you. A terrible move indeed, I'm so upset at the idea that this great community of generous people kickstarted Facebook.
Believing you'll keep full control on Oculus and the Rift is very naive.

I first read about this on ArsTechnica, and I literally checked the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st. To paraphrase several people's comments from that article, I don't have an F big enough to go with the WT.

This is a huge betrayal, Palmer. Make no mistake about it, you've just lost a huge chunk of the faith and pride we all had in you and in what you started _with_our_help_. When this journey started, a little voice in the back of my head said "this kid is too young to do this right," but I went ahead and donated anyways because I was so impressed with the technology and with the idealistic drive of this very young man. He made me believe. Today is the day I see where his inexperience has led us: straight to selling out to Facebook.

David Tse could not be more wrong regarding the attitude of what I suspect is the vast majority of Oculus's Kickstarter backers. We did not pre-order a product. We gave Palmer our hard-earned cash to help start what we thought was the beginning of a VR revolution by a small intensely-focused group of visionaries and engineers. Having them sell out to Facebook, which is widely seen as the embodiment of all that is wrong with the new digital economy, is truly heart-breaking. There is no such thing as autonomy when you're in bed with Facebook. WhatsApp is learning that lesson right now.

Summary:
- Oculus needs lots more cash and scale to make the Rift as good as it can be and deliver on the VR we all wanted
- Facebook likes the cut of Oculus's jib and gives them infrastructure, capital and other resources in return for a financial stake in the next big thing

From the sound of it Oculus retains all the autonomy they need to deliver on their goal, just with FB's considerable backing. Good luck to them.

They don't get to remain autonomous, 1.5 billion of the deal is in Facebook shares. If you don't think Facebook is going to but in on every decision they make, you are dreaming. Like saying the NSA wouldn't spy on every day citizen's phonecalls or e-mails.

Seriously? Why is everyone so pissed? I have two problems with all of your complaints. First off, kickstarter is for doing exactly what it's called. It's for kick starting projects and the companies that create them. We "donated"(really we just preordered a product) and they used the money to create the product and deliver it to us. Now that the product we paid for is finished and in our hands we are no longer entitled to any say about what the company does. We are not investors in the company we simply helped create their first product by pre-ordering it, or buying something lesser. You may not like the deal, but you are in the same boat as everyone else who did not back the original product. You have no extra entitlements or rights because you were a backer. You should not feel personally insulted by this deal. Oculus successfully fulfilled all of their obligations to every single kickstarter backer by delivering a kickass dev kit. This move is not a big fuck you, it’s a decision they made as a company to grow and create the best VR products they can for us.
My second problem is, what’s wrong with this deal? Oculus gets to remain completely autonomous just with a shit load more money to make better products for US. This deal is a great thing for Oculus, and for all of us. We all believe in VR and this deal is going to make it so much better and get here so much faster.
PS. Can someone please tell me why everyone hates Facebook as a company so much? To me it looks like everyone has an irrational hatred of Facebook, but what have they ever done to deserve such hatred? I could have missed something horrible they did, but to me they seem like perfectly decent company that’s going to help grow oculus rapidly.